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Eats shoots and viruses

Posted on 17 Jun 2004 at 11:30

David Moss falls in love with a cute, furry animal, while Jon Honeyball gets his hands on Apple's Xserve RAID

Panda offers a range of different solutions designed to complement each other and create different layers of a total defensive strategy. The outermost layer is a hardware device called Panda GateDefender, which I have yet to examine. Beneath that is Panda CVPSecure, a software solution that scans inbound and outbound HTTP, SMTP and FTP packets in real-time, as they pass through CVP-compatible firewalls. Panda ProxySecure provides the next level of real-time protection - it's designed to work with Microsoft's ISA and Proxy servers and also adds the next layer of protection for SMTP gateways such as Sendmail, Qmail and Postfix. Beneath that sit the groupware solutions for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Domino, and below those yet another set for Windows and Novell file servers. The final, deepest, layer provides anti-virus and anti-malware support on the client side at workstation level. The solution I chose to start with is Panda BusinessSecure, which comprises the following components: AdminSecure, ClientShield, CommandLine Secure Antivirus and Antivirus Platinum 7. An identical set of software called Panda's 'BusinessSecure Antivirus with Exchange' is available for Exchange users. All modules are available separately so you don't have to take the route I did, and it's easy to add on other packages, such as the ISA and firewall solutions, at any future date. Alternatively, there's a Panda EnterpriSecure Antivirus package that ships with all the modules mentioned above, so all you'd then need would be the GateDefender hardware for complete protection.

AdminSecure is the pivot-point for all the modules, and installation is no more complicated than placing a CD in a drive and running a setup program. You don't really notice the modular structure, as they all get installed at the same time, and after a short while you simply fire up AdminSecure to deploy the client-side software. AdminSecure scans your network and displays those systems it finds in a list, each identified by machine name and the operating system it's running. You then examine this list, including or excluding certain systems as desired, and on those you approve AdminSecure will install Panda AdminSecure Communications Agent, which handles all further communication between the main servers and those workstations/servers on which the anti-virus software is to be deployed.

These agents can be installed manually from the AdminSecure software running on the Administration Server, or via the use of installation packages, or via user login scripts, and full instructions are supplied on all these routes. Once the agents are deployed, you can then begin to install the appropriate modules from the Panda BusinessSecure range: ClientShield to the workstations, ExchangeSecure to Microsoft Exchange servers, and so on. Each of the modules provides a range of protection, so, for example, installing Panda ClientShield covers areas like email, hacking, spyware, dialers, jokes and more besides.

The documentation is extremely well laid out, and nicely presented, although I'd have to say that it could do with some sexing-up in its use of illustrative screenshots - I haven't yet read every page of the Help file, but I've yet to find a single screenshot, which is rather poor. People learn in three different ways: audibly, visually and through the written word, and since most people have a marked preference for one type over the other, all need to be well covered.

Dull and non-visual it may be, but there's enough raw information in these Help files to enable you to understand pretty much anything that's going on. The AdminSecure console, on the other hand, is just the ticket as far as I'm concerned. It's easy to use, provides me with the information I need in seconds and enables me to configure my systems in a fast and efficient manner. Updates are continuous and perfectly seamless, so it does exactly the job I require, which is to run unobtrusively in the background and not hog my system resources.